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#PeggyWallaceKennedy #JimCrow #GeorgeWallace #Segregation Peggy Wallace Kennedy was 8 years old when she got her first glimpse of the troubling future that awaited her. She was living in Clayton, Alabama, then a tiny segregated town in the Jim Crow South. Her father was George Wallace, the future Alabama governor and archvillain of the civil rights movement who stood in schoolhouse doors to block black students from enrolling and once declared, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." That version of her father, though, didn't yet exist for Peggy Wallace in 1958. She knew her father as the charmer with the Brylcreemed hair who handed her M&M's, called her "sugah" and never talked politics at home. But her world shifted one day when her mother sent her to a black seamstress to get some clothes mended. As she climbed the steps to the seamstress's home, Peggy heard the woman's voice from inside the house...

In 1975, Norris Henderson went on trial for second-degree murder as a 19-year-old in New Orleans. He thought he was a free man when there were two holdouts on the jury. "Watched Perry Mason all my life," he says. "Okay, 10-2, I'm outta here." But he was mistaken. Louisiana has a split-jury system that only requires ten of twelve jurors to return a guilty verdict. "Sheriff put the handcuffs on me and took me to the back," Norris recalls. "I was like 'something ain't right.'" Henderson spent the next 27 years in prison until a judge released him. Now, he's leading a coalition to push for unanimous juries. Louisiana voters will decide the matter Tuesday when there's a constitutional amendment on the ballot to repeal the Jim Crow-era law that allows for split juries. "This is Jim Crow's last stand," Henderson says. The split-jury system is a vestige of Louisiana's 1898 constitutio...